


It's That Easy

by vinnie2757



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Explicit Language, F/M, au where cid is a grown man who owns up to his feelings, mentions of sex bc cid is a grown man who can talk about it without blushing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28225938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: Cid Highwind is twenty-four when he first meets the love of his life, and is twenty-six when he realises it.[pre-game, canon divergence. Cid and Shera's relationship if he owned up to it a lot sooner than never]
Relationships: Cid Highwind/Shera
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	It's That Easy

**Author's Note:**

> Only a short thing because the inspiration struck and Scarfloor enabled me.
> 
> For Nino, who always says nice things.
> 
> Enjoy, lovelies~!

Cid is twenty-four when Shera arrives, and he’s twenty-six when he realises that he’s – he’s – he’s in love with her. It’s oddly liberating to say it, to feel it in the back of his throat as he sits in an uncomfortable hotel chair, holding onto the hem of his jacket, hanging too big on her shoulders. He’s got to hold onto it, feel the rib of the hem against his palms, the stitching under his nails, he’s got to because he’s kind of a little bit scared he’s going to fall off the totally stable and solid chair under him. She’s between his knees, cradling his jaw in both hands, turning his head this way and that way and looking at him with a crease between her brows, her makeup smeared and her hair a mess.

‘I’m sorry,’ he slurs, and she brushes her thumb against his top lip, scrubs a bit of blood from his stubble where it’s still coming from his nose.

‘Captain,’ she replies, so gently that he wants to puke.

Could be the blood, could be the concussion, could be the fact he’s so desperately in love with her and never, ever wants to let go of the feeling of her thighs against his knuckles where he’s holding onto his jacket hanging lower than her dress hem.

‘No,’ he says, shakes his head, and there’s two – five – three of her for a moment, shivering and settling back into one. ‘No, I’m sorry. Not the – not the Eventide you wanted.’

She smiles, and then says a thanks to John, somewhere behind him, who has brought water and a cloth, and she lets go of him to take it. Cid feels like he’s swaying, about to topple, and then she sets the bowl in his lap, forcing him to still so he doesn’t knock it over.

Taking the cloth and dunking it in water, stinking of Potion and Antiseptic, she begins dabbing at his face, the fresh break in his nose, the split in his lip, cleaning away the blood and scrapes.

‘Captain,’ she repeats, thumbs bloody water from his cheek. ‘You’re here, and you’re going to be alright, and I – that’s all that matters to me. I don’t – I never cared about the party.’

He huffs out a breath and then hisses, face screwing tight as she dabs at the gaping maw of a gash at his hairline, carefully teasing crumbs of glass from the tangles of his hair, grown too long for his liking because he overheard her say once several months ago that she likes the way he looks when it’s just long enough to start curling on the top and he sweeps his hand through it and it goes all floppy to one side.

‘Sorry,’ she whispers, and he hears the tinkle of the glass hitting the tile beneath them.

‘Don’t,’ he sighs, because wincing hurts too much to keep going, even if the sting of a Potion in his temple is excruciating. ‘It’s my own fault for getting glassed.’

‘You only got glassed because of me,’ she protests.

His fingers tighten in his jacket, pull without meaning to, and she makes the tiniest noise of surprise in her throat, steadies herself on his shoulder, and her fingertips against his collar are blazing. He blinks up at her, finds her blinking back at him.

‘I love you,’ he tells her, and it comes unbidden, but there’s nothing else he could say in that moment, looking at her looking at him with such an – an expression of _love_ , a warmth he’d never have known if he didn’t feel it in his own face.

‘You’re tired,’ she replies, but she’s blushing, a smile teasing at the smudge of lipstick at the edge of her mouth. ‘I’ll get you cleaned up and you can rest.’

He doesn’t mean to, and he’s not sure how it happened exactly, but he pulls on his jacket in such a way that the bowl of water slips off his lap and she half replaces it. He’s vaguely aware of his socks getting wet, but he’s more concerned that Shera’s warm and close and doing that nervous laugh she does when she’s not entirely sure what to make of him and his idiot boy ways.

So he does the reasonable thing, which is to take her face in his hands and kiss her silly.

She cups his jaw, his neck, rests her hands on his shoulders, holds him half at bay.

‘Captain,’ she tries, but the expression of concern is not one of disgust, betrayal, discomfort, just confusion, the barest glimmer of hope, maybe.

‘Listen to me,’ he says, painfully aware of the catch in his throat sending his voice at least two octaves higher and he hasn’t had to worry about sounding like a fucking child since he was fourteen, but fuck it, why not. Declare to the love of your life that you love her in the voice of a fucking ball-dropping teenager, sure, fuck it.

She stares at him, and he stares back, the curve of her mouth, lipstick smudged and worn and fuck sake he’s dreamt of her mouth.

‘I love you. I – fuck me, I’ve been in love with you since I first fucking saw you.’

She can’t be comfortable, braced half on his lap and half on the outer edge of one foot and the toes of the other, using his shoulders as an anchor, but her face flames beneath the spattering of blood and dirt and dried cocktail clinging to her hair. She licks her lips, swallows.

Then she smiles, dimples and teeth and she bites her tongue in a way that makes his blood burn, and then she’s kissing _him_ , and he’s not really thinking about it anymore.

* * *

They don’t talk about it again for months. They get back to the launch site, and Reine goes spare, lots of handwaving and yelling and berating of her husband for letting the kids get into such a state that the _Captain got glassed!_ , but they don’t say anything about it to anyone. Shera, still in his jacket over the too-short dress, but with a hotel-soap clean face and hair, glances at him as she slips past the still-yelling Reine. He smiles, barely, uses his cigarette to hide it, and she ducks her chin to hide her smile in turn, disappears through to the back and he hears her thud up the stairs.

‘What are you grinning about?’ Reine demands of him, and he shakes his head.

‘Nothing,’ he promises. ‘Concussion, probably.’

He thinks she calls him a fucking idiot, but Reine doesn’t use that kind of language.

After dinner, during which Shera had slouched enough that he could reach her feet with his under the table, and during which Reine had watched him like a hawk, using the self-serve nature of her cooking as an excuse to stand behind him and pick through his hair to look at the scabs like a particularly agitated mother, Shera follows him outside. It’s far too cold for her to be out without any shoes on, but she follows him anyway, because she’s a lunatic. The others are still inside; he’s only stepped out to smoke.

He glances at her, the open door, the light streaming across the porch, and nods his aching head to the side, where there are shadows and an overhang and a conveniently placed tree to hide behind. And shove her up against to kiss her, but that’s neither here nor there.

Between kisses, she manages to gasp out something about loving him too, and he’s never felt so alive.

He stops kissing her when the cigarette burns out against his fingertips and he hisses, shakes his hand out, then grunts and holds his head.

‘Does it still hurt?’ she asks, in the way that girls ask stupid questions like that.

‘I got glassed,’ he snorts, but drops his hand to let her touch his face, turn him back and forth to examine the healing cuts in the dim light from the moon. ‘’Course it fucking hurts.’

‘Then I’ll just have to come and take care of you,’ she says, like it’s that easy.

It is, he discovers, when she comes racing downstairs an hour later with a paper bag stuffed to tearing, that easy. She’d announced to Reine, in the way Shera announces things – which is to say, she’d skulked after Reine into the kitchen while the latter was sorting out dessert, and quietly told her – that the Captain was still in a lot of pain, and that as it was her fault he’d been injured, she felt it only right that she go with him to his cabin to look after him.

He wonders, as they walk across the common area between the cabins, if she’d have tried to insist on him staying at the Inn to be cared for, had he not said what he said. But it doesn’t matter, because she follows him to the cabin, and when he turns back from locking the door, she’s looking at him with an expression he never would have expected to see on her face.

A week later, she’s a permanent addition to the cabin, and absolutely nobody bats an eyelid about it. They don’t – you know – show off the way Cid sees so many young people in Midgar do, all hand-holding and public kissing and it’s very disgusting, but Shera moves next to him at dinner, rests her head on his shoulder when they finish eating and sit talking and he wraps his arm around her like it’s the most natural thing in the world, he says thank you to her during construction of the rockets, and he generally takes a little better care of his health and well-being, whether she’s there to witness his folly or not.

They don’t discuss it again for months, the whole love thing. It just _is_ , a thing hovering between them acknowledged and known and adored, and he’s happy with that. Happy with her in his bed, in his heart, at his side, the one person he thinks he could trust with his life.

* * *

If he doesn’t launch the rocket now, it’ll never launch, and he knows this, and Shera’s telling him to do it, to let her do this one thing for him, and he should have _fucking listened_! He’s going to lose the love of his fucking life because he _didn’t listen_! She’d said something was wrong, and he didn’t listen, and he knows she’s right! Of course she’s right! She’s always fucking right about shit like this, but he was so determined to be right, to be the first man in space, to – to – to – fuck, he can’t _kill her_!

He hits the button so hard he hears something crack, and an automated voice tells him that the launch is aborted. Later, he’ll learn he broke his hand hitting the Emergency Engine Shut Down switch, but for now the rocket whines, shakes, and the world begins to tilt, but he’s not even really aware of it, out of his seat and racing to the ladder. He slips about three rungs down and nearly bites his tongue off slamming his chin on the next one as he plummets down, but fuck it! Fuck it!

The engine room is burning hot, and he can smell burnt hair and skin and one of the oxygen tanks is out of its housing – eight, the one that Shera had been about to check, the one he’d had to bodge because of that fucking thief, and she’s there – she’s there and she’s –

She’s clutching her hand in a way he’s never seen her clutch her hand, and half of her coat is missing, the skin of her shoulder burnt. It’s superficial at best, he’s sure, but she’s still hurt – still _injured_ , because of him, because of his stupid fucking dream.

‘Shera,’ he chokes out, and she smiles at him.

‘I’m alright,’ she tells him, and the rocket settles beneath their feet.

‘No,’ he protests, too loudly, ‘no, you really fucking aren’t!’

It’s fucking boiling in there, and he can feel the heat through his boots as he strides across to take her face, knock their foreheads together as he takes a breath, two, three, steadies himself.

‘You could have fucking _died_ ,’ he snaps, finally, and she huffs out something like a laugh. Her cheeks are wet. He can’t imagine the pain.

‘You shouldn’t have aborted the launch,’ she tells him. ‘They’re going to pull funding.’

‘I don’t fucking _care_ about funding,’ he tells her, and it’s barely a hiss between his teeth.

She looks taken aback, her eyes wide and red and wet, and he licks his lips, kisses the end of her nose.

‘Listen,’ he says, keeps hold of her jaw as he straightens to look her in the eyes, the warmth of honey and tea and the green of sunlight in leaves, and so many things he’d never thought to love until he found her. ‘Listen, I – I just.’ He’s aware of the desperate pitch of his voice, the shake in his hands, but the words come tumbling out of him before he can stop them. ‘I want you to marry me.’

‘What?’ she breathes back, her mouth open and kissable and quirked in a way that he’d never thought to find confusion so attractive.

‘I can’t lose you,’ he tells her, voice pitching in several directions at once, ‘I can’t – I – Shera, I – he said to – ‘

‘To?’ she echoes, and the innocence in her face is a bullet to the gut.

She hadn’t heard them in the cockpit, hadn’t heard what the comms team had said – what that _fucking prick_ had said.

He swallows, takes a breath, strokes a strand of hair away from her face, sooty and flushed with the heat.

‘Marry me,’ he says, and she frowns at him for a second, reading the panic vibrating under his skin, before nodding with a soft half-smile.

‘Yes,’ she says.

Back outside, the air is – is – Cid’s knuckles ache. Some fucking idiot – that – that new kid, from ShinRa, the bootlicker that was so desperate to fucking kill her, for what? What would it have fucking achieved if Cid had let the launch go on? Some fucking brownie points for being on the site when the rocket launched? Fucking idiot.

The panic washes out of him in a hot sweat, replaced by an anger that just – that just – Shera is leaning into him, using him to keep herself upright, and he needs to do that for her. He needs to stand with his back straight and his jaw squared, and he needs to clutch her hip in his hand as tight as he dares, he needs to not hold her too tight so she doesn’t accidentally squash the hand she’s cradling to her chest. They get halfway down the stairs before he gives up trying to manoeuvre when there’s not space for them side by side and twists, sweeps her into his arms for the last twenty or so steps. He puts her down again as soon as they’re on the grass, but she stays leaning into him, and he can feel her shaking.

He doesn’t know what to do, and all he can do is keep her upright.

‘Captain?’ John, calling from by the command centre.

Everyone’s filed out, as you’d expect when there launch has been a catastrophic failure because the Captain nearly killed his fucking girl – fiancée, she’s his fiancée now, she agreed to marry him and nothing has felt more right in his life. Maybe being in the air, flying, maybe. Shera in his arms is giving it a good run. His blood is boiling, the weight of what Matteo said catching up with the rest of his body now, but he breathes through his nose, breathes in the sooty, citrus smell of Shera’s hair under his chin. He looks at John, concerned, the engineers, horrified, Livas, rubbing his knuckles the way he did before the bar fight that got the Captain glassed. Matteo, half behind him. Cowering – no, he’s standing too straight, too indignant. He doesn’t realise Livas is in front of him for a reason. Cid breathes deep, looks back at John.

‘She needs medical assistance,’ he calls, and the calmness of his voice startles him.

His heart is pounding against his rib cage, his fingers tingling, his throat tight.

John slaps the arm of one of the engineers, who goes to race off, but Reine and Ana are already there, and Cid carefully peels Shera away from him. She’s raw-looking, distant in the eyes, but she smiles at him.

It’s deathly silent, and Cid realises it with a start. He can’t even hear himself breathing. Shera’s looking at him with this smile, like she’s so in love with him, and he can’t bring himself to smile back. He can feel the tension in the air, and she’d be a fool to not feel it, the weight of what happened, of what was said. She doesn’t know, but she must be able to feel it.

‘Captain,’ Reine says, and Cid snaps his gaze to her.

The expression on his face must say everything he’s thinking, because she shoots him a disappointed, exasperated look back. He swallows, looks back at Shera, who looks shakier now, like she’s about to give out. She needs to sit down, get patched up, have a cup of tea. She just nearly fucking _died_.

He brushes her hair back from her face, careful not to nudge her glasses, cups her jaw, lifts her face so he can kiss her. He doesn’t usually kiss her in public, in front of other people. He doesn’t like doing it, doesn’t like showing affection like that, but he – he can’t not. He needs to – to ground them both. The heat of her breath against his face when she exhales shakily through her nose, the dampness of her cheeks compared to the dryness of her lips.

‘I love you,’ he tells her, so quietly he worries she doesn’t hear it.

Her nose bumps his as she nods.

‘I love you,’ she echoes, just as quiet.

‘She’ll be alright,’ Reine assures him as he reluctantly passes her across. Though Shera is the taller of the two, she looks small against Reine, so young and frail, even though she _isn’t_ , and Cid is so fucking angry.

‘She better,’ he nods, and Ana scoffs, waves him off.

The boys, the engineers and the technicians and the mechanics and the Captain, they stand there and watch as Reine and Ana take Shera away, out of hearing range and behind the safety of the shut Inn door. Not a single one of them says a word while the girls walk away, they barely even breathe. The weight of _forget about her_ hangs between them.

The Inn door shuts, and Cid very slowly exhales. He’s reminded of his father, in that moment, the way he’d breathe out before pulling his belt free to get Cid across the back of the legs, but someone advocating the willing death – murder! Just outright fucking _murder_! – of his girlfriend – fiancée – _wife_ – feels very different from using the wrong fucking fork at a bullshit formal dinner.

‘Captain,’ John says, but it’s nearly drowned out by the sound of Livas’ knuckles cracking.

Matteo, clearly not done being a fucking idiot, sidesteps the pilot and approaches Cid.

‘I don’t understand!’ Matteo exclaims, and there’s a buzzing in Cid’s ears, so loud it’s a swarm of flies inside his skull. ‘You had the clear to launch, why didn’t you take it?’

Cid hasn’t been in a fight for just over two years now, that bar brawl the last he’d needed to get into. Not that it matters, because this isn’t a fight. This is one clear punch to Matteo’s face that puts him straight on the floor and has him spitting out teeth by the second punch.

John and Livas shoo the rest of the team off, but don’t intervene. They stand there for a minute or two. Cid is vaguely aware of them chattering amongst themselves beneath the blood pumping in his ears, debating what Reine might serve for dinner. Livas is hankering for pasta, and Isak of all people for potato, but John rightly – rightly! – says that it’ll be whatever the fuck Shera wants to eat because the poor fucking kid’s been through enough.

Livas suggests that someone should go and start their engine to take the prick to the hospital, and then John very carefully touches Cid’s heaving shoulder.

‘Okay, kiddo,’ he says, tucks his fingers into Cid’s armpits and heaves, hauls him to his feet, ‘I think he’s done.’

Cid tries to break free, but John’s got a good grip for how little he’s holding, and so Cid settles for a good hard kick that audibly cracks a couple of Matteo’s ribs. The man whimpers, wet and guttural, clutches his ribs. Cid doesn’t care, doesn’t have any pity or sympathy. His knees are knocking and the world’s blurry, and John shifts his grip, keeping Cid upright instead of dragging him away.

‘Alright,’ he says, gentle, soothing, and Cid hiccups, his breath coming too fast, too shallow. ‘Alright, you’re okay, you’re done. You’re done.’

He heaves Cid over to a chair and dumps him in it. Cid can’t see his fingers, but he tries to light a cigarette anyway. Everything is red and shaky and blurred, and John carefully takes the cigarette and lighter from his hands, sticks it in Cid’s mouth for him, lights it. Cid scrubs his eyes with bloody hands and watches as Livas hoists Matteo to his sobbing feet and drags him to his car. Someone’s got to put him somewhere where people will care, and it isn’t here.

‘Want me to go with them?’ Isak asks, and Cid blinks at him. He asks it in the way that you might ask if you had anything for the trash before it gets taken out.

‘No,’ Cid breathes, ‘no, he’s had enough.’

That Isak had asked meant more than anything; he knows Isak well enough to know that it’s an empty offer, but it was one made, and that counted.

‘She’ll be alright,’ John says after a minute. ‘You’ve got a strong lass for a girlfriend.’

‘Wife,’ Cid murmurs.

John makes a very dignified noise.

‘What?’ he asks, when his nasal passages have cleared.

‘Wife,’ Cid repeats, just as quiet, and he stares at his shaking hands. ‘I – I asked her to marry me.’

John is quiet for a moment and then he bursts out, at full volume, ‘you asked her to marry you?’

‘She said yes,’ Cid replies, pitched as a protest, as though he can’t believe that John doesn’t believe him.

It’s not the proposal that has astounded the innkeeper; far from it, they all knew it was coming. But Cid has to pick his moments.

Cid’s heart has quieted, a little, enough that he can hear the crunch of gravel as Reine approaches.

‘I don’t want to know,’ she says, because Cid is splattered with blood and there are teeth on the ground. ‘She’s alright. She wants to sleep and she wants those honey shortbreads I made last month. If you clean him up, he can take her home.’

John claps Cid on the shoulder, and the latter drops his cigarette, stomps it out.

‘She’s alright?’ he asks as John hauls him to his feet, his knees still knocking.

‘She’s alright,’ Reine nods, ‘it’s superficial. I’ve still called in at Mideel to ask for some burn salve to be sent over, they do a better one than I’ve got.’

Cid whips round to look at her, and she holds up her hands.

‘I haven’t told them, Shera asked me not to. They obviously know the launch was a failure, it was a live broadcast, but the cameras were gone before you got out.’

Cid huffs; he’d forgotten all about the reporters. It had been a worldwide broadcast, so everyone with a television or a radio would know that he failed to fucking launch. He runs his hands through his hair, breathes out deeply, shakily.

‘Fuck,’ he says, for lack of anything better to say.

‘Yes, well,’ Reine hums, ‘for now, just get yourself cleaned up, and I’ll bring you by something for dinner later.’

Cid does as he’s told, scrubs himself raw in the bathroom behind the bar, and winces at the pain in his hand, looks at the swelling.

‘Huh,’ he says to himself, prods at what he recognises is a broken bone. ‘Huh.’

Shera is in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. Her shoulder is bandaged now, and she’s in one of Reine’s vests which hangs weirdly on her, too loose in the chest but too short at the waist. She looks defeated, deflated, and Cid stands there for a moment, holding his broken hand and watching her stare at nothing.

‘Hey,’ he says, quietly, so she doesn’t jump.

She flinches, and then huffs out a breath that sounds like a laugh.

‘Hey,’ she replies, lifts her chin to meet his gaze.

‘Reine says to take you home, and she’ll bring us something by. Says you want to sleep and eat shortbread.’

Shera’s ears go pink.

‘It’s good shortbread.’

He laughs, and moves to help her up.

It’s only later, after he’s eased her out of the ill-fitting vest and into one of his t-shirts, that she starts to blubber. The t-shirt is her favourite, a many-times-washed blue one that’s faded in the creases and pilled at the chest, but the hems still have a trace of the original navy behind the stitches. It was, he thinks, the one he’d been wearing about an hour before she first showed up, and it had seen enough sun in the subsequent two years to have faded as much as it did, given that he rarely actually kept the fucking thing on, but it’s her favourite and so he carefully eases it over her head, threads her arms through it.

The town is silent, which doesn’t surprise him, even though it’s the middle of the day. He’s drawn the curtains of the bedroom, locked the door, and Shera curls into his chest, legs tangled between his, burnt hand cradled between them. She sobs and shivers and he strokes her hair, stares at the ceiling and keeps his fucking mouth shut.

‘I could have died,’ she chokes out between sobs, and he twists his neck to kiss her crown.

He doesn’t say anything, because he knows that whatever he says will sound trite. He’d held out as long as he could, hoped she’d complete the check and get out, but thirty seconds was never going to be long enough to climb the ladder, never mind complete a proper check. She saved his life almost at the cost of her own, and he owes her that. He owes her his life a thousand times over, and she doesn’t fucking know it. But he can’t tell her that. Now is not the time to tell her that.

‘They’re never going to give us more funding,’ she offers next, and he wonders if she’s trying to make him bite.

Shera is not one for arguing, and Cid’s found that for all he finds fault with everything everyone does, himself most of all, he’s not very fond of arguing with her. Oh, they have their blazing rows, usually at the weirdest and most inopportune of moments to pick a fight, but they elbow each other after a half-hour’s stony silence and that’s the end of it. Usually, it’s because Cid’s done some absolute mind-boggingly stupid thing and Shera has rightly called him an idiot for it, but Cid is not one to be told he’s in the wrong, even when he knows it himself.

So they fight, and they make up, and they agree to not argue about the same exact thing in another month’s time when he does the same stupid fucking thing again.

‘I don’t care,’ he tells her, ‘let them pull their fucking funding. You’re alive, that’s worth more to me.’

‘I nearly died,’ she repeats, quieter.

They lie there in silence for several moments. Her hair is soft under his fingers, but dry, and he’ll wash it for her later, if she’s up to a bath.

‘You asked me to marry you,’ she whispers.

‘You said yes,’ he whispers back.

And that’s the end of that discussion, too.

* * *

Cid wakes with a start one night about a week after the launch failed. Shera is asleep beside him, her shoulder still bandaged, but her hand freed now, though the skin is mottled and peeling where the burn salve is working its magic. He’s sweaty, and shivering, and for a moment, he thinks he’s ill, but then the dream – the _nightmare_ – comes rushing back to him. Shera, dead in his arms, burnt to ash by the heat of the engine because he didn’t abort the launch in time. Shera’s screams coming over the comms as the oxygen tank explodes and tears her apart. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and then rests his fingertips against her neck, her pulse. Counts her heartbeats, runs his hand to her bare back, feels the stretch and pull of her skin as she breathes.

It’s only as he goes to swing out of bed that she wakes.

‘You done?’ she asks, the way she always asks.

He’s a poor sleeper, has to sleep in short bursts else he doesn’t sleep at all. She’ll always ask if he’s done sleeping for now, just so she knows to go back to sleep. She’s not even really awake when she does it, it’s so habitual now.

‘Yeah, yeah, get some sleep.’

He kisses her temple, waits until her breathing evens out before he goes to the bathroom and throws up.

* * *

They get married the next spring, just after Cid turns twenty-nine and Shera comes up on her twenty-sixth. It’s a farce, because it was always going to be a farce. He calls his mother to tell her, and she brings down a fucking entourage of dress fabrics and dress makers and her strident voice, hooting and hollering about how she can’t believe she wasn’t introduced before the whole thing became official and then she involves herself, and at least Shera gets on with her. Shera gets on with everyone, which is probably the only reason she likes him enough to marry him.

He asks her about it, one night as they sit in the bathroom so he can massage an ointment her dad sent over into her shoulder. The burns were superficial, thank the fucking planet, but they’ve left scars, and he’d recommended this cream to help with the scarring. Given that it was Cid’s fault she got the fucking scars in the first place, he insists on being the one to apply it, and Shera doesn’t protest. He knows from the droop of her eyelashes and the heaviness of her breath that she enjoys it, finds it relaxing or whatever. He’s happy to provide.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks, because he doesn’t always give her context for the bullshit he comes out with.

‘Is it just because you’re a people person that you like me? Is that why you agreed to marry me?’

‘I’m not dignifying that with an answer,’ she replies, ‘you’re being deliberately obtuse.’

He doesn’t tell her he doesn’t know what obtuse means outside of geometry.

She aches a lot over the winter, but she looks forward to the spring, and spends time with his mother, and her own, when she hears that Catherine Highwind has come down from the mountains of Deist to get involved, creating a dress and doing all the planning for the wedding. His mother is insistent on it being some fancy thing. Shera is adamant that as long as Cid has clean hands he can show up in whatever he likes.

‘No,’ her own mother would disagree. ‘No, he can’t show up like that.’

Here, she would gesture at Cid, in his multi-pocketed trousers with the tears at the knee and stains from hip to ankle, and his greasy, washed-out t-shirt, his hair a tangled mess behind his goggles, cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his hands black with engine oil from his latest tinkering project.

Cid would play his part, for what it was worth, looking down at himself and protesting that he’s perfectly serviceable.

‘Cid Highwind,’ his mother would admonish, ‘keep your private life to yourself.’

It wouldn’t be until after dinner, as he and Shera dawdle back home, Shera swinging their laced fingertips, that he would realise his mother meant his _sex life._ The thought of his mother thinking about him having sex nearly gives him a conniption, but Shera laughs so much at his squawking and shuddering that he can’t be too upset for too long.

Mother-related drama aside, he buys Shera a thick sweater he sees when he’s out running errands one afternoon, some mustard yellow thing with a big cowl neck and it’s probably a size up but she wears it non-stop throughout the winter, so he thinks he did alright.

The spring comes, and there’s moss on the rocket. Cid thought he’d be bothered by this, but people are coming by now to see it, to ask questions. ShinRa have renegotiated his contract, so now he’s training pilots for a new series of airships they’ve commissioned him and his team to work on building, because they have one of the best aeronautical engineers in the world at their fingertips (ha, Cid would think as he listens to Palmer on the phone, his fingertips tripping up and down Shera’s sleeping thigh) and it would be a shame to waste their talents. Fucking ludicrous, but it’s better pay than failed astronaut.

Without him having pretty much anything to do with it, he wakes up one morning to find himself alone and Livas trying to break down the door.

‘Motherfucker!’ he yells, ‘let a man sleep!’

‘It’s your fucking wedding!’ Livas yells back, and oh.

Oh, shit. Right.

So he scrambles to get dressed, and he supposes he’s presentable enough once Livas has smoothed out his hair – kept the length Shera likes it, short at the sides and the nape but left long on top, and combed neatly so he doesn’t look like he’s had a quick fuck round the back of the inn – and then – and then – it’s a race around the edge of town to the marquee both of their mothers insisted on setting up, because who cares about the fucking monsters when you can have a fucking tent.

He’s late, because of course he’s late, it’s his wedding, and he was never going to show up on time for it, and he trips over the fucking rug they’d put down for Shera to walk down, and narrowly avoids breaking his nose on a chair. He scrambles to his feet, yanks his waistcoat – waistcoat! His mother had managed to force him, at twenty-fucking-nine, into a waistcoat! – straight and pretends like he meant to do that all along.

Shera is at the end of the deadly fucking rug, and she’s absolutely fucking stunning, this impossible, beautiful woman he’s marrying. The dress is beautiful, lace and delicate and with some floaty sleeves to hide the smear of scarring along her shoulder, and her hair’s curled and braided and has flowers in it and she looks at him with so much devotion he’d worry he wasn’t doing his part if he didn’t know how much he loved her in turn.

And then he’s told he can kiss her, kiss his _wife_ , and fucking _hell_ this is – his mother has made an absolute farce of it, and her mother hasn’t helped, and he’s tried to stay out of the way, but this is his wife!

He loses the kiss because he’s laughing, but Shera’s laughing too, and that’s – that’s –

Fuck, he’s so ridiculously happy.

Then Shera falls flat on her face tripping over the train of her dress and breaks her ankle, so that’s that. Injuries all around and he doesn’t even get to – ahem – consummate the marriage.

Absolute farce.

* * *

When she’s healed, they honeymoon in Costa, and visit Mideel and Deist, and Shera falls for Deist’s wintry charms, it’s dragon bones and its towering architecture. Cid hates it, but Shera loves it, and when they visit Icicle Inn, she’s the one to point out the dragons in the Inn.

‘I wonder if your family helped set it up,’ she says, and Cid shrugs.

The Innkeeper finds out he’s the Highwind boy and demands that they stay free of charge.

When they return, it’s like they never left. There’s more tourists to see the rocket, and the trainee pilots have a lot of questions, but they’re even more keen to tell tales on Cid to Shera, who has her own engineering students to worry about, so she tells them to behave and get on with their work. They don’t have dinner at the Inn as much, but they make sure to stop by and see everyone when they get the chance.

Then, one day about a month after they get back, Shera goes very quiet for a few days. Cid’s used to her going quiet and distant and getting absorbed in her work, and just lets her get on with it. Then he gets up one morning to find her stood staring out of the window, spoon hanging out of her mouth that way she has when she gets caught up thinking about something in the middle of making tea, and he slips into the space behind her, arms around her waist to rest his hands on her belly, pulling her into him, snug and warm and meant to be there.

She startles, and the spoon clatters to the floor. It rings out in the sudden silence, and Cid hesitates, feels the shift in the air but can’t find the words to break it. Without saying anything, Shera lays her hands atop his, and holds him tight.

* * *

Just under nine months later, she gives birth to a healthy baby boy.

* * *

His mother sends down his crib from Deist, along with a golden chicobo, and Cid rubs at an increasingly sore spot in his eyebrow at the sight of it.

‘The fuck am I going to do with a chocobo?’ he demands of the courier, who just shrugs, and tells him that Lady Highwind gave him the instruction to not return with any of it.

‘Cid, I am not having Kain’s first word be “fuck”,’ Shera tells him, and if he hadn’t a week ago witnessed one of the most harrowing experiences of his life, he’d probably shiver at the sound of her swearing, the way he always shivers at the sound of her swearing.

But childbirth keeps him up at night, so no, not right now, thanks.

He’s grateful for the crib, though, he is. His mother had the sense to send him the Fratley one, not the Highwind one. Though equally as ornate, the Fratley crib holds infinitely healthier memories than the Highwind crib. His father had been too focused on the heritage and the prestige and the supposed importance of the Highwind family, instead of the comfort of his son’s sleep, and his mother is very pleased to hear that Kain sleeps through the night once they get the crib set up with new bedding, including a lovingly – if unprofessionally – made baby blanket from Reine and Ana.

Between the rest of Rocket Town and Shera’s parents – who send her the changing table she’d had as a baby, and several supplements that her father guarantees will support her immune system – Kain Highwind is possibly the single most spoilt child Cid has ever known, and he saw some of the Upper Plate fuckers in Midgar, who took the definition of silver spoon far too literally.

This isn’t to say they let the tot know it; his favourite toy are his parent’s tools, and when he accompanies them on their day-to-day lives, he does so either in one of his father’s arms or in a sling across his mother’s chest. Cid will hand him a screwdriver while he talks through a piece of airship engineering, and trade out for a different screwdriver five minutes later to find it sticky and gnawed on. For a baby with no teeth, Cid is very impressed at this turn of events, and gleefully tells his wife about it over dinner.

Shera, for her part, is no better, and will hand Kain whatever tools she needs for the day, and regularly the baby comes home from a day with blueprints covered in pen.

Once Kain’s crawling and able to make his own choices of things to gnaw on, his favourite is a set of carved wooden blocks John laboured over in the last few months of the pregnancy. There are several, each with letter of the alphabet or numbers on, and Kain is wild on them. He’ll stack them, knock them over, trip over them in a way very reminiscent of his mother, and he’s gum on the corners of them until Cid has to trek over to the Inn at seven in the morning in his boxers to deposit the gummy, splintered blocks on the kitchen table and request that John – quote – sort them out.

‘If he doesn’t get splinters, I will,’ he explains, and John goes a little pink at seeing his gift so well-loved.

As Kain is the unofficial mascot of Rocket Town, Russ uses his contacts to get them all sorts of items that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to get on the market for several months, and Kain is presented, for his first birthday, with a pair of aviator goggles like his dad’s. Cid does not blubber, because Cid is not the crying type; he didn’t cry when the launch failed, he didn’t cry when he got married, he didn’t cry when his father died, and he certainly doesn’t cry over the tiniest pair of aviators he’s ever seen and how they make his son’s hair stick up in the exact same way his dad’s does.

They don’t dare take him in the _Bronco_ , but they do take him up in the _Highwind_ , and Kain babbles and slaps at the glass and seems to enjoy being in the sky.

‘A Highwind through and through,’ Shera quips, looking back over her shoulder to Cid at the helm.

He snorts.

‘If he starts jumping before he walks, then tell me that.’

She offers him a smile that blisters in his heart, and turns back to pointing out landmarks to their son.

* * *

Kain is two and change when AVALANCHE rock up. Cid is in the rocket, as he has been for a week or so, because ShinRa are making noise about starting up the space program again. Cid has been restless since Palmer came to talk to them about it, because of course he still wants to go to space, of _course_ he does, but he’s –

He still rubs cream into his wife’s shoulder on a nightly basis. He kisses his son goodnight and gets up to comfort him in the night because he really does seem to take after his father in that he hit the two-years-old mark and stopped sleeping through the night, the way that Cid stopped sleeping through the night at two-years-old and hasn’t had a full night’s sleep that hasn’t been medically induced in the following thirty years.

There’s more to his life now than space. There’s so much more, and he’s so –

He doesn’t know what to do.

Shera tells him to fix up the rocket, to make a presentation to impress Rufus, to put his head together with John and Livas and Isak, and work out a battle plan of how they’re going to make this shit work, and just tell her what he needs her to do, and she’ll get it done.

‘It’s your dream, Captain,’ she tells him, cups his face and draws him in to kiss him, ‘I’ll be here, one hundred percent of the way.’

‘I can’t do it without you,’ he tells her, which is the closest he’ll get to admitting that he still has has nightmares that he didn’t abort the launch in time.

‘You won’t have to.’

 _I won’t die_.

So Cid’s in the rocket, and Shera is about to put some washing on the line, Kain balanced on her hip and gnawing on a toy screwdriver. She comes out of the house, sheet over her arm when she sees Cloud and the rest of them standing on the other side of the fence, gawking at the _Bronco_ and talking, not at all quietly, about stealing it.

‘May I help you?’ she asks, and the girls’ eyes go wide.

The baby does that, she’s noticed. He’s a more powerful weapon than his father could ever hope to wield.

‘This plane,’ Cloud says, ‘it’s really cool.’

Shera smiles, and hooks the sheet over the line, crosses the yard to stand a bit close to them. She’s not a complete fool, she knows who they are; they’ve watched the news in the evenings, when they can bring themselves to listen to the propaganda, and had many a discussion about whether they were responsible for dropping the plate.

‘The Captain will love to hear that,’ she says, and adjusts Kain on his hip. ‘He’s in the rocket, if you want to speak to him.’

Barret pulls a face. ‘Fuck we want to – ahem – why would we want to do that?’

Shera lowers her eyebrow and bites back the smile at Aerith very pointedly stamping on Barret’s foot. It is, she’d learn later, very ironic of her, given the words that come out of her mouth.

‘Well, if you ask nicely, I’m sure he’d let you borrow it, instead of you having to steal it.’

Barret flushes, and Shera smiles properly now.

‘I’m Shera,’ she says, ‘and this is Kain.’

Aerith makes their introductions and coos over the baby, the way everyone coos over him. Kain is unimpressed, and huffs and puffs around his screwdriver.

‘You know,’ Shera says, looking back at the _Bronco_ , ‘I was hoping when I heard voices that it was going to be ShinRa. Rufus is supposed to be here today.’

She knows what she’s doing, and Cloud and Barret puff up as she expected them to.

‘Rufus?’ Cloud squawks, ‘here?’

‘To talk about restarting the Space Exploration Program,’ she says, ‘but like I said, the Captain’s in the rocket, if you want to speak to him.’

Not even twenty minutes later, Cid is down from the rocket, huffing and puffing about some pipsqueak with a sword trying to borrow the _Bronco_ , and Shera kisses him, hands him their squirming toddler and goes to put the kettle on.

Cid has a dozing Kain on one hip, a mug of tea in the other hand, when Cloud and the others file back in, and Cid waves the cup at them, orders that they sit and drink their tea.

‘Ain’t got shit all to do till Rufus shows up,’ Cid grunts, and Shera rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Though there is no way Cid can see her, given that they are both facing away from each other, he says, ‘don’t roll your eyes at me, he’s asleep for once. Anyway, Rufus is late, and I’m getting tired of waiting.’

As if summoned, the door bangs open to admit the fat fuck that is Palmer, and from there, everything goes to shit.

**Author's Note:**

> I enjoyed writing this, and I could have gone further to take it into how the gang respond to dad cid, and maybe I will if yall want that?


End file.
